Barcodes were conceived as a kind of visual Morse code by a Philadelphia student in 1952, but retailers were slow to take up the technology which could be unreliable.
This change in the early 1970s when the same student, Norman Woodland, then employed by IBM, devised the [11] Product Code. Since then, black stripes have appeared on almost everything we buy, a ubiquity fuelled by their price it costs about a tenth of a penny to [12] on a barcode.
Barcodes were conceived as a kind of visual Morse code by a Philadelphia student in 1952, but retailers were slow to take up the technology which could be unreliable.
This change in the early 1970s when the same student, Norman Woodland, then employed by IBM, devised the [11] Product Code. Since then, black stripes have appeared on almost everything we buy, a ubiquity fuelled by their price it costs about a tenth of a penny to [12] on a barcode.